Death in a Scarlet Coat

14

The slaughter in the woods came to an end shortly after four o’clock in the afternoon. The American financier called Wright had failed to hit a single bird, morning or afternoon. His fellow guns felt he was more of a danger to them than he was to the wildlife. But he kept his good humour throughout the debacle, reminding whoever would listen that he was never allowed near the baseball field in his native country as he couldn’t hit the ball. The tall thin man called Burroughs, however, shot an unbelievable number of birds. He never missed. He never spoke either. Of the two the shooting party preferred the man who shot none to the man who shot so many.

Shortly after tea Sandy Temple found himself seated next to the other peer of the realm at the house party. Lord Winterton of Winterton Staithe was as different from Lord Hudder as it was possible to be. Lord Hudder was recently ennobled. Lord Winterton’s title had been in his family for five hundred years. Lord Hudder made his money from his chain of grocery shops. Lord Winterton had many thousands of acres in Norfolk and extensive property in Norwich and in London’s West End. Lord Hudder had yet to speak in the House of Lords. Winterton had made his maiden speech nearly twenty years before on the early death of his father.

He looked about forty years old. Sandy thought you could see him, with that blond hair and the deep blue eyes and the arrogance of aristocracy, immortalized in uniforms of scarlet and black on the walls of the long galleries of the great houses of England, painted full-length by Lawrence or Reynolds, surrounded on all sides by his ancestors.

Sandy Temple decided to take the plunge. After a conversation with Winterton he could refer to ‘peers I have spoken to recently’ in his articles for The Times if he so wished. ‘Excuse me, Lord Winterton, would you mind if I asked you a question?’

‘Not at all,’ said the peer, scarcely moving from his newspaper. ‘Fire ahead.’

‘My question is this,’ said Sandy, ‘how do you intend to vote when Lloyd George’s Budget comes up in the Lords?’

‘Do you have a personal interest in the matter, young man?’

‘My name is Sandy Temple, sir. I work for The Times, in the parliamentary and political department, covering the work of both houses.’

‘Delighted to meet you, Mr Temple. I do believe I may have read some of your stuff in the past couple of years. How nice to have somebody to talk politics with in this place. The rest of them are all obsessed with killing as many birds as possible.’

‘And the Budget, Lord Winterton?’

‘Ah, the Budget! This is one of the most difficult decisions I have had to take since first sitting on those red benches. I think I shall have to vote against my principles, not something I care to do very often. Perhaps I’d better explain, young man. I am a Conservative. I like to think of myself as a proper Conservative. I don’t like change. I don’t like reform unless it is absolutely necessary. I believe very strongly in preserving the great institutions of this country, the monarchy, the ancient constitution, the Church of England, the aristocracy, the armed forces and so on. I am more than wary when Conservative politicians start talking about the condition of England question or Tory democracy. Those are not Conservative movements. Conservative politicians should aim to do less, not more. The condition of England is a question for the people of England rather than the politicians. Tory democracy is a contradiction in terms. Lord Salisbury, may God rest his soul, was the only politician in my lifetime to believe that his job in politics and as Prime Minister was to conserve, to keep things as they were, to steer clear of change.’ Lord Winterton stopped suddenly. ‘I say,’ he said, looking closely at Sandy, ‘I’m not running away with myself, am I? You can follow what I’m saying?’

‘Perfectly,’ said Sandy. ‘Please carry on.’

‘I have long thought that some day there would be a battle between the Lords and Commons. Power is slowly seeping away from the Lords; power is growing ever stronger in the Commons. Who’s more important? If you look back at the Prime Ministers we have had over the past couple of hundred years more of them have come from the Lords than the Commons. But I think the sweep of history is with the Commons, not the Lords. I think they are probably tomorrow, if you follow me. I and people like me are yesterday. Sooner or later women will probably have the vote and all adult males will be enfranchised. The long slow tide that began sweeping through the constitution with the Great Reform Bill hasn’t finished yet. That’s why I’m going to support the government over the Budget.’

‘I don’t understand, Lord Winterton. Forgive me. You say you are a Conservative and you obviously are. But you’re also going to support a bill that increases taxes and death duties. It’ll probably cost you a great deal of money. I don’t see how it adds up.’

‘I can’t have made myself clear, Mr Temple. My plan is, in a way, a delaying action. If you think that you are going to lose in the end, you want to end up holding on to as much power as you can. You don’t want your opponents taking it away from you. If we behave ourselves, as it were, and let the Budget go through, there won’t be a battle. Not this time. It’ll come later. But all our powers will remain intact. If we throw the Budget out, there’ll be an almighty row which we shall probably lose in the end. Then we have to take our punishment, which would certainly involve a lessening or even a removal of many of the powers traditionally vested in the House of Lords. Better live to fight another day than end up with heaps of dead lying all over the battlefield. Do you follow me, Mr Temple?’

‘Perfectly, Lord Winterton, but I should be most interested to know how many of your colleagues agree with you.’

Winterton laughed. ‘That’s a good question, young man. You will recall that the Conservative Party has been called many things, including the stupid party. I have been a great disappointment to my own family on this score. I let the side down by taking a double first in history from Christ Church when an undistinguished third was what was expected. Conservatives are suspicious of clever people. I have tried to explain my views to a number of my colleagues. It was hopeless. I might as well have been talking about Schopenhauer and German metaphysics. They simply didn’t understand; their eyes glazed over. It was a total waste of time.’

‘So which way do you think the vote will go? Will they let it through or throw it out?’

‘Let me ask you a question this time, Mr Temple. What do you think will happen? You have been observing the Lords for some time, after all.’

‘I would love to be able to answer your question, sir, but I cannot. The Times always emphasizes that we are not to have or to publish opinions of our own, only to report those of others.’

‘I suppose I have to respect that,’ said Lord Winterton. ‘I am fairly certain about what they will do, myself. You will remember, I’m sure, that one of the characters in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd loses all his sheep when they fall over a cliff. If you think of my colleagues in the Upper House as being those sheep, you will not go far wrong. Already they are egging each other on to throw the Budget out. They are massing in the field by the cliff and making sheeplike noises. When the vote finally comes they will run at full speed to the edge of the cliff and fall over. Not for nothing did that fellow call them the stupid party!’

Lord Francis Powerscourt was conferring with Inspector Blunden in his office. A great heap of unsorted papers lay sprawled across his desk. The policeman looked as if he was fighting a losing battle.

‘Nothing, absolutely nothing, my lord,’ he said. ‘All those interviews over the past few days with all those people who were at the railway station and all we have, as I said before, are two witnesses who thought they saw two people in GNR uniform crossing the bridge to the far side of the special train, where they may or may not have garrotted the Earl. We know somebody must have got into that compartment but we can’t be sure it was those two. That’s all. No other witnesses to the mysterious pair. None of the staff on board the train noticed anything. They’ve all been questioned three times now. Nobody else reporting anything suspicious. No sight of the uniforms. Just this paper.’ He waved at the pile in front of him. ‘I’ve never known anything like it. It’s as if the entire population have gone dumb.’

‘Are the people who work on the railway all from round here? Or are there some who come up and down the line from Boston and so on to work here?’

‘I think most of them are local. There’s always been a tradition in Candlesby village of local men working on the railway but nobody there has seen anything at all – or else they weren’t at work on the day in question. I had people over there yesterday afternoon.’

‘So much of this investigation hinges round information we haven’t got. How was the first Earl killed? Why was he killed? If we knew the answer to that question we might also know who killed his son. Do not despair, Inspector, we’ll get there in the end.’

‘Do you think there will be more murders, my lord? A third or even a fourth? Should we put a guard round Candlesby Hall in case sons three and four might be the next victims?’

‘Do you know, Inspector, I don’t think we should do that just yet. But I do think you should warn them, even the youngest, not to go out unless they have to and then to be vigilant at all times.’

Inspector Blunden began to cheer up at the thought of action. ‘I’ll go over there straight away and put them on their guard. At least then I shall feel I’ve done something useful today.’

Powerscourt wasn’t sure whether keeping the third Candlesby son alive would add greatly to the general happiness but he kept his reservations to himself.

‘Excellent, my friend,’ he said. ‘I am going to interview one of the chief suspects, well, one of the chief suspects according to the ladies of Lady Lucy’s lunches. The man whose wife was having an affair with the old Lord Candlesby and ended up walking into the sea, Sir Arthur Melville. And before that I’m going to take Lady Lucy to the seaside for a walk along the beach.’

Lady Lucy Powerscourt was staring at a letter that had just arrived. The notepaper looked as though it had been torn from a child’s school exercise book. There was no envelope. The missive had been folded in two with her name, slightly misspelt, on one side. Inquiries at the hotel’s main desk could not reveal how it had come, whether by a person on foot or a person on a bike or a person in a motor car. It seemed to have arrived at the Candlesby Arms under its own steam.

‘Dear Lady Powwerscurt,’ she read it again, ‘you are all barking up the rong tree about who killed Richard, Lord Candlesby. It was not one of these outside peeple. It was his own fambly. Believe Me. From One Who Knows.’

Lady Lucy was not sure if the letter came from a crank or a madman or someone who really knew what was going on. Long experience of her husband’s affairs had taught her that the most unlikely explanation was often the correct one.

‘What do you think, Francis?’ she said to her husband as he joined her after his time with the Inspector. Lady Lucy thought Francis looked preoccupied. But then he often looked preoccupied in the middle of an investigation.

‘She could be right, you know,’ he said after a quick perusal of the letter.

‘How do you know it’s from a woman, Francis?’

‘Well, I don’t know that for a fact. It just seems more likely that it comes from a woman. Look at the handwriting for a start. I can’t see a man signing himself off as One Who Knows. The thing may be disguised to look as if it comes from somebody who’s not very well educated when in fact they can read and write as well as we can.’ He turned and stared out of the window as if his mind was elsewhere. ‘Come, Lucy, it’s time for our walk by the sea.’

Ten minutes later they were in the Silver Ghost and heading for Skegness. Powerscourt was driving. Rhys had been left behind for the day. Overhead the sky was a brilliant blue. The seagulls circled ceaselessly overhead squawking their unintelligible messages to each other. About a mile from Skegness Powerscourt parked the car. A small track ran down to the beach. Lady Lucy watched her husband patting anxiously at his jacket pocket as if checking something was still there. She felt certain it was bad news.

There was a strong wind blowing straight into their faces as they set off along the beach that led to Mablethorpe. A couple of ships were beating their way southward towards Norfolk. Mr Drake at the hotel had told Lady Lucy that boats ran in high summer from Skegness to Hunstanton and back, with the passengers often going to inspect the royal residence at Sandringham on the other side of the water. Lady Lucy suddenly remembered that it was during his investigation into a scandal in the royal family at Sandringham that she had first met Francis all those years before. He had proposed to her, she recalled with a smile, during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Royal Albert Hall, the actual proposal inscribed on newspaper in the middle of an advertisement for Colman’s mustard. Lady Lucy thought she still had that newspaper filed away somewhere at home. When the investigation finished they had been married at the Powerscourt church in Northamptonshire with a wounded Johnny Fitzgerald as best man. She felt intensely happy for a moment. Then she looked at her husband’s face. He was handing her a rather different letter from the one she had been reading earlier. Her heart sank as she saw that it came from the War Office. ‘His Majesty’s Secretary of State requests the pleasure of Lord Powerscourt’s company as soon as his present investigation is over, Yours sincerely, Sir Arthur Jensen, Permanent Under Secretary.’

‘Oh, Francis,’ she said and tucked her arm into his.

‘It’s the devil, Lucy, the very devil.’

With that Powerscourt began walking away from Skegness. He stared out into the North Sea, moderate breakers pounding on to the beach. In his mind’s eye he could see the great dockyards of Britain from Portsmouth to Glasgow filled with thousands and thousands of men building dreadnoughts, the new super battleships that rendered almost all previous warships redundant. Across the North Sea from where he was standing, in Kiel and Hamburg, in Danzig and Bremen, their German counterparts also had their giant cranes and the enormous guns that made up the German dreadnought fleet. Sometime soon they must meet in the dark waters of the North Sea in an engagement that could decide the course of the war in a single afternoon. He thought of the terrible photographs of the dead and the wounded after the critical battles of the American Civil War like Antietam and Gettysburg, long lines of men with one leg shuffling around the inadequate hospitals. Across the plains of Europe Powerscourt saw whole armies rising out of the earth like dragon’s teeth, men clad for battle in grey and khaki and dark blue carrying rifles, Germans and French, English and Dutch, Russians and Italians. Rumbling behind them he could hear the thunder of the artillery and the crash of the exploding shells, the screams of the wounded and the dying, the rumble of innumerable trolleys along the corridors of innumerable hospitals that tended the innumerable victims.

He turned to face his wife. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Sorry, Lucy,’ he said, ‘my mind was just taken over by a vision of war. I think it was worse than any of those horrific visions of hell in Hieronymus Bosch with the tortures and the torments.’

‘Don’t worry, my love.’ Lady Lucy was keen to change her husband’s mood as quickly as she could. ‘It may be nothing. The War Office people, the authorities, as you refer to them, may only want to clear up some details from work you did before. There could be nothing in it.’

‘If that was the case,’ said her husband, a terrible land battle still pounding away in his brain, ‘they’d have asked for the details in the letter.’

‘Well, it can’t be urgent,’ Lady Lucy pressed on, ‘or they’d have ordered you to come straight away.’

‘I don’t think that’s necessarily true either,’ said Powerscourt. ‘They wouldn’t want to draw attention to themselves by pulling me off this case.’

‘Francis,’ said Lucy sternly, sounding as if she was talking to a naughty twin back in Markham Square, ‘I don’t like it when you go all negative like this. It isn’t good for you. I know you aren’t looking forward to going back, as it were, but you’ve got to finish this case first. And you aren’t going to do that by moping about on the beach thinking about battleships or whatever it was you were thinking about just now. Let’s be practical. I think we should go and see this Melville man right now. It won’t matter if we’re a bit early. One of my ladies said he is drunk all the time anyway. And you’re not to make yourself depressed thinking about things you don’t know anything about like this latest message from the War Office.’

Lady Lucy stared at her husband, hoping she hadn’t overdone the criticism. But he was smiling at her.

‘You’re quite right, of course, Lucy; you usually are. How fortunate I am to be married to such a sensible person. I shall concentrate on the matter in hand.’ He kissed her gently on the top of her head. But when she looked at him surreptitiously a few moments later, she could see that he was still staring out to sea, looking, she thought, like some shipwrecked mariner scanning the horizon for the sails of rescue.

Sir Arthur Melville’s Elizabethan house had been there for so long now that it looked as if it had been folded into the landscape. There was a small ornamental fountain at the front with a couple of peacocks on parade. Sir Arthur, the butler announced, would receive them in the library. Powerscourt expected some grand linenfold room with ancient bookshelves groaning with leatherbound volumes from centuries past. In fact the shelves looked as if they had only been put up the week before and they were filled with the great novels from the previous century: Dickens and Trollope and George Eliot and Conrad from Britain, Stendhal and Balzac and Flaubert from France, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from Russia.

‘Sold the other library, don’t you know,’ Sir Arthur said after the introductions. ‘Old one, full of old books. Unhappy memories, you see. Late wife used to like reading and writing her letters in there next to some damned history of the Roman Revolution.’

Powerscourt and Lady Lucy nodded as if selling old libraries was an everyday practice.

‘Got a damned good price for them, mind you. Some American fellow bought the lot. Think they’re somewhere in New York by now, Manhattan I think he said.’

One of the peacocks had drawn up very close to the window as if it wanted to join in the conversation, inspecting them in a most superior fashion.

‘Look here, I know why you’ve come. You said so in your letter.’ Sir Arthur scrabbled about among the papers on his desk but failed to find the relevant correspondence. ‘Never mind. I say, you do know what happened here, don’t you, Flavia killing herself and so on? I don’t have to tell you about that all over again, do I?’

Powerscourt noticed that at the mention of his late wife’s name he looked like a man being whipped in the face.

‘Certainly not,’ said Powerscourt. ‘There’s no need to drag all that up again. We’re more interested in how you’ve been coping since.’

‘It must have been terrible for you, Sir Arthur,’ put in Lady Lucy with a sympathetic smile.

‘Well, I don’t know. You see, I’ve never been very bright, I’ll be perfectly honest with you. All those sums and translating bits of Greek at school, I couldn’t cope with any of that. Once you realize you can’t do it, that it’s not for you, there’s no point worrying about it. So I joined the army. I wouldn’t be the first person to tell you that you don’t have to be very bright to follow the colours. But I quite enjoyed army life. My first commanding officer warned me that I wouldn’t rise up very far there either, never make Major, let alone Colonel, that sort of thing. He said they wouldn’t trust me in command of a flock of sheep – those were his very words.’

Sir Arthur laughed. ‘I told the fellow I didn’t mind. So I had years and years in the army. When I saw how difficult it was to command troops in battle, my goodness, what a strain, I felt quite happy where I was.’

‘Did you expect to get married after you left the army, Sir Arthur?’

‘Well, that’s the rum thing, if you follow me. There was I, not very bright as I say, getting on in years, set in my ways, not much of a clue what to do with women, then along comes Flavia, previously married to some university chappie, bursting with brains, Flavia, I mean, and she marries me. Well, I mean to say. I don’t think I understood very much about women before we were married. I understand even less now. What did she see in that Candlesby person? Did she like him because he was such a cad? I just don’t understand.’

‘I don’t think we will gain very much by going down that road, Sir Arthur,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Tell me, when it was all over, how did you feel about Candlesby? You could have been excused for feeling bitter towards him, if not more.’

‘I suppose you mean did I hate him enough to kill him? I did hate him enough to kill him. But I rather fell into the bottle, if you’ll forgive me for saying such a thing. I hit the bloody bottle in rather a big way, actually, starting after breakfast and continuing until lights out. There is one problem with all that. If you’ve got through a bottle and a half of claret before lunchtime, you’re not going to be in a very fit state to go off and kill people. You’d fall off your horse for a start. I think I may have sat by the edge of the fountain and told the world how I was going to be avenged on him. I do have one thing to report though. I always managed to get upstairs last thing at night. No servants ever had to help me to bed. Army code was very strict about that sort of thing. Bad form for an officer to get too tight to walk. Bad for discipline; the men would lose all respect.’

Lady Lucy waved a hand in the general direction of the desk. ‘Forgive me, Sir Arthur, but are you laying off the drink today because we’re here?’

‘Not so, Lady Powerscourt, not so! I haven’t had a drink now for thirty-three days and fourteen hours precisely.’ Sir Arthur checked his watch as if it had been designed to show the length of his sobriety.

‘That’s very impressive,’ said Powerscourt. ‘But it does lead me to one important difference between drunk and sober. You said before you were not well enough to ride a horse in your drinking days. Now in the time of sobriety you would be perfectly capable of riding over to Candlesby Hall in the middle of the night and killing the Earl. Is that not so?’

Sir Arthur laughed. ‘Good try, Powerscourt. But I didn’t ride over there. I didn’t kill the Earl. You see, I have almost stopped thinking about the Earl, especially now he’s dead. He doesn’t matter any more. In any case I hope to be away from here fairly soon.’

‘Are you planning to leave your beautiful house, Sir Arthur?’ said Lady Lucy.

‘I am, I am.’ Sir Arthur suddenly sounded like a small child with a birthday present. He pulled a large box file from a drawer and began pulling out piles of newspaper cuttings, hotel brochures, travel books, pages pulled out of newspapers. ‘Look at this lot! The American who bought my library offered to buy the house as well. He said he planned to transport it brick by brick and chimney by chimney to some place called West Egg on Long Island Sound, wherever that is. Offered me heaps and heaps of money. Maybe I should have said yes, but I thought the house should stay here. I’ve thought about Paris, I’ve thought about the Riviera, I’ve thought about Sicily. Must be bloody hot in Sicily in the summer, I should think. Always been fond of the heat. But in the end I decided against all of them.’

‘Why?’ said the Powerscourts, almost in unison.

‘Comes back to what I was saying before, you see. The only subject worse than sums for me at school was foreign languages. French, Latin, Greek, that sort of thing. Completely foreign to me, they were, what? My papa sent me to Paris for a month when I was eighteen to learn the bloody language. I might as well have been turned deaf and dumb. Couldn’t even order a beer in a cafe at the end of it. Just about managed to secure the services of a porter at the station to help with my luggage when I went home. Even then, I had to use sign language. So I thought I’d better stay here.’

‘Have you decided where you want to go, Sir Arthur?’ asked Lady Lucy.

‘I think so,’ he replied. ‘Cornwall. A house close to the water. Gulls squawking. Walks on the cliff. Royal Navy sailing past every now and then. Reassuring fellows in those circumstances, the navy. Friendly natives who speak English. I’m going down in ten days’ time to have a look, as a matter of fact.’

‘We wish you the best of luck,’ said Lady Lucy.

‘And thank you so much for your time,’ said her husband.

Sir Arthur must have had some invisible means of communicating with his staff because the butler appeared at the door to show them out. They left him pulling on a pair of spectacles and opening a large envelope which said ‘Polperro’ in very large letters on the front.

‘Well, Francis,’ said Lady Lucy as the Silver Ghost whispered its way back to the Candlesby Arms, ‘what do you think? Was Sir Arthur telling the truth?’

‘I think he probably was,’ said Powerscourt, ‘but you have to be very careful with these people who claim to have no brains.’

‘What do you mean, my love?’

‘Well,’ said her husband, ‘I knew lots of people like him at school. The teachers told them they were stupid, they told themselves they were stupid and forgot all about it. Plenty of sport for them, dead fish, dead stags, dead grouse, dead woodcock – you didn’t need a great deal in the way of brains to do all that. Fifteen years later you discover that these people have all made fortunes in the City of London, rich as Croesus some of them. Must take a different kind of brain to do that. Zero marks for French and nought in mathematics doesn’t seem to matter.’

‘So do you think Sir Arthur could have done it?’

Powerscourt paused to hoot at a carriage in front which was perched right in the middle of the road and travelling at about five miles an hour. The driver waved happily as they passed.

‘I don’t think Sir Arthur could have done it, Lucy. And I’ll tell you why. One of the many mysteries we can’t answer about this case is just how the old Earl was killed. Blow after blow with some blunt instrument to one side of the face requires a certain amount of imagination. I don’t think Sir Arthur would be capable of it.’

‘Who would?’

‘That, my love, is what we have yet to find out.’